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M' Lud I would like to read from some notes, if it would please the court. Were the notes made at the time? No m'lud, they were written about seventy years later. Seventy years! Are you pulling my plonker? No, m'lud, but I have very good reason to believe that the person who wrote them was telling the truth. You didn't write them yourself either, is that what you are saying? That's right m'lud. But have it on good authority that the person who wrote the notes knew many people who were there at the time. So these notes were not written by direct eye witnesses but are hearsay accounts written down later? How much later? About 50 years or so, maybe a little more, but they are very good accounts, and most scholars agree the translations are reasonably good. So they are not even written in our language? Well, they couldn't be your honour, our language didn't develop until at least another thousand years later. A thousand years! How old are these dodgy hearsay stories? Nearly two thousand years, give or take a few for the old mists of time and academic disputes. But some are a few hundred years younger. But if they are younger that surely makes them even less contemporaneous? I suppose it does, but they are very reliable, everybody says so. And who, exactly, is everybody? Well, all the people that believe them, who else? Yes, who else indeed. Do you know of anybody who does not believe them? Errr, yes, but they are all vicious evil heathens, aren't they? And what makes you say that? Well, these accounts, they are the truth, they say they are, so it stands to reason that anybody who says they are not is evil, doesn't it? These accounts are totally outside anything covered by the rules of evidence, to take account of them here would be to hold the court up to ridicule. Just one more thing officer before I dismiss you for wasting the court's time with these absurd ideas you consider to be evidence: where did you find these accounts? Here in the courtroom your honour, you make the people hold them up and promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. |
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